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The purpose of this paper is to present a new web‐based cataloguing system for the global music bibliography project, Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM), and discuss the implications for the manipulation and discovery of musical heritage materials.

The paper is designed to illustrate the workflow and tools used in creating a global musical catalogue, and to present the experiences of the Swiss RISM working group in developing new tools and re‐thinking traditional music bibliography tools.

The new tools developed present a further decrease in latency between source cataloguing and availability to users by integrating both the cataloguing and exploration interfaces into a single web application.

For music researchers, the opportunity to search and manipulate a global musical source database opens up new possibilities for data‐driven computational musicology and analysis.

This paper reports preliminary work in musical incipit searching in the Swiss RISM database, as well as the latest developments in integrating digital facsimile images and sound resources.

The present paper describes an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research project into Scottish fiddle music and the important considerations of music digitization, access and discovery in designing the website that will be one of the project’s enduring outcomes.

The paper is a general review of existing online indices to music repertoires and some of the general problems associated with selecting metadata and indexing such material and is a survey of the various recent and contemporary projects into the digital encoding of musical notation for online use.

The questions addressed during the design of the Bass Culture project database serve to highlight the importance of cooperation between musicologists, information specialists and computer scientists, and the benefits of having researchers with strengths in more than one of these disciplines. The Music Encoding Initiative proves an effective means of providing digital access to the Scottish fiddle tune repertoire.

The digital encoding of music notation is still comparatively cutting-edge; the Bass Culture project is thus a useful exemplar for interdisciplinary collaboration between musicologists, information specialists and computer scientists, and it addresses issues which are likely to be applicable to future projects of this nature.

One afternoon, about twelve years ago, the telephone rang, and a strange voice said: ‘Hold on! I'm going to put on a gramophone record near the 'phone and I want you to listen and tell me what the tunes are: it's a potpourri of Johann Strauss waltzes.’ I fear I wasn't able to identify many of the tunes, and I only mention the episode as having been one of my earliest and certainly my most vividly remembered introduction to a practical aspect of the subject of this paper. Thirty years ago, these services as we know them today hardly existed. In any library, information services must depend very largely on catalogues and the way in which they have been compiled: so I propose to base most of my remarks on an outline of the growth of the British Museum's catalogues that bear on music, and to link this with an account of the kind of information we are asked for, and to show how we have tried to build up our knowledge in general and the catalogues in particular to meet this demand. I shall not say anything about the kind of information that can be provided simply by consulting Grove and other standard works of musical reference. I also want to try to show how ‘information’, widely interpreted in a well‐balanced national collection of music, could bring it to life in a novel way with immense possibilities. Finally, by way of introduction, I must emphasize that I am concerned solely with the Music Room, which forms a division of the Department of Printed Books. Information regarding the large collection of manuscript music which is in the Department of Manuscripts is the concern solely of that Department. But I may mention here that the Music Room does contain a good deal of manuscript material which forms an inseparable part of special collections such as the Queen's Music Library, the Hirsch Library, and the Library of the Madrigal Society. For information about these manuscripts the Music Room staff are responsible.

‘Your name? your country? who gave you those clothes?’ These famous leading questions, uttered by the shrewd Arete on seeing the much‐travelled Odysseus clad in garments belonging to her husband Alcinous, might have been echoed by the shade of Robert Eitner when confronted with the recently published first volume of the International Inventory of Musical Sources. For while Eitner would scarcely have recognized in the Inventory the principles of his own Quellen‐Lexikon, he would also have been amazed at their transformation and have wondered how and where it all happened. The format and binding of this volume are handsome, in the style of the twentieth century: the threefold location symbols begin with the letter or letters denoting each country according to the international registration of motor‐vehicles—a form of transport unimagined by Eitner. To those who tread in his footsteps, sixty years later, it is clear that without the inspiration of his great achievement the Inventory would probably have taken much longer to become a reality. Its origin must, therefore, be considered briefly in relation to its forerunner.

THE re‐organisation of local government in Greater London and the resultant amalgamation of library authorities is viewed by many with considerable misgivings. The upheaval of staff, the loss of status for some senior officers, the general uncertainty for the future—these are very real consequences of the Act and they cannot be ignored. Many chief librarians will see the work of a lifetime, perhaps spent in building up a comprehensive and unified system, made virtually meaningless overnight.

The re‐organisation of local government in Greater London and the resultant amalgamation of library authorities is viewed by many with considerable misgivings. The upheaval of staff, the loss of status for some senior officers, the general uncertainty for the future—these are very real consequences of the Act and they cannot be ignored. Many chief librarians will see the work of a lifetime, perhaps spent in building up a comprehensive and unified system, made virtually meaningless overnight.

The aim of this publication is to list the catalogues of the Department of Manuscripts which are in regular use. Catalogues which have been superseded by later publications are not normally included, since whatever their historical or bibliographical interest they are no longer everyday working tools. To save space in cross‐reference, the catalogues, etc., here listed have been numbered serially in Clarendon type, thus: 31. This numeration has no other significance.